For the fragmentary uncoiling of the memories that he had of his childhood, director Terence Davies found with his creation—his stirring British landmark—Distant Voices, Still Lives a form that brought them to vivid and vivifying life. This is cinema as a high-order process of recreating what had been destined to make no sense at all, a mishmash of half-remembered things…
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As if to indulge the glittering and fanciful dreams of the young, adolescent girls of the world—they’re out there, they’re hiding, they often can’t help themselves and really, I can’t see the harm in it—the long fluttering coattails of the gallant and half-savage Mr. Darcy make this man into a mythical creature. That long-drawn-out approach at dawn is so superb,…
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Because of its adaptation from a play written by the Hungarian dramatist Miklós László, the screenplay of The Shop Around the Corner takes as its setting the wintertime streets of Budapest—at first blush a strange and even arbitrary location for a group of well-groomed and fast-talking Americans, all of whom inevitably speak the language of the New World. And yet…
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The image of a charming twosome, slack and romantically engaged, each leaning toward the other in one of those countless Parisian cafés to whose notability the cinema has made a profound and immemorial contribution: it is Frédéric with his potential lover Chloé, a holdover from his youth having returned to say hello, to reminisce, and maybe to get something out…